Tagging resources may be particularly useful in activity-based computing and digital resource management.
Traditionally computers (including PCs, laptops, mobile telephones, PDAs and the like) have been configured to support the user in the serial use of applications. For example, a user may be writing a document, and at the computer system level editing the document is a discrete and solitary task. However, the relationship of the document to the larger activity which the user is undertaking (for example, compiling a literature review) is not taken into account by the computer system. It is up to the user to arrange windows, start and stop applications as necessary and search for relevant information stored on the local machine and elsewhere.
Activity management is known in the field of “activity-based computing” (ABC). Activity management can be seen as a response to the traditional application and file-centered computer paradigm. Activity management systems are computer systems which are designed to support humans who are working on activities comprising a plurality of tasks where a task may be defined from the system's point of view as discrete, solitary and application bound. Activity management systems seek to enable a user to associate individual elements of an activity in such a way that those elements can easily be recalled. Driven by work place observations illustrating how users are often required to switch tasks many times throughout the working day, such systems also seek to enable a user to fluidly switch between activities and their associated resources.
Some previous approaches to activity management have involved the grouping of windows that are associated with an application or services and providing access to the content that the user is using while performing an activity. For example, tasks are organized by dragging a window tile onto another window tile, which then associates the windows on a taskbar. In this approach a user is able to arrange the order of windows within each group. Task switching occurs by clicking between groups located on the taskbar.
Other approaches have tried to make use of human spatial memory. For example, a user is able to define a primary focal area on a desktop (this may be the size of one screen on multi-screen displays). Within this focal area, windows are displayed in full size, while other running windows are shrunken to the periphery of the screen. The aim of this is to eliminate the need for minimizing windows, and make use of the spatial memory of the user to locate windows relating to given tasks. The periphery of the screen may be used to spatially arrange windows into activities (i.e., groups of tasks) which may be named, and it is through this that activity management is enabled. Maximizing a window returns it to its previous state in the focal part of the screen, minimizing it returns it to the last place in the periphery. Tasks can be switched by clicking on them, which causes the windows to return to their last focus position.
So called “virtual desktop” approaches are also known. These enable users to create multiple virtual desktops (called rooms in some systems), in order to arrange activities via related windows. Each virtual desktop may be named, and each room may contain doors to other rooms, to move windows from one desktop to another.
Tagging resources may also be useful in the field of digital resource management. In the computing environments, work is performed by receiving, accessing, creating, and distributing digital resources. Digital resources need to be persisted in order to be used or provided to others for use. Persistence of resources is facilitated by saving digital files by the worker or automatically by the computing system in a local computing environment or remote data stores. In some instances the computing system or a service stores the content in a proprietary data format in a proprietary data store, e.g., e-mail inbox and folders, Web sites, a Web browser cache and bookmarks, etc. Access to digital content may be facilitated by search on the file identifiers, e.g., file name, or properties, e.g., file type, or content features, e.g., keywords contained in the file content. In some systems the user can assign keywords or tags to the file and the system can provide access to the files based on the user assigned tags. Some PC desktop applications provide facilities for tagging resources during the resource use, e.g., by accessing the property information provided by the system and adding the keywords to describe the content or additional tags to attach to the file. In some instances both the keywords and tags can be provided by the authors or consumers of the content and they may be used differently by the applications and services in the computing environment that are processing the content.
The embodiments described below are not limited to implementations which solve any or all of the disadvantages mentioned herein.